by M. D. Cooper
“No, Tim. You can’t go back to sleep. I don’t want you to sleep.”
Tim’s eyes drooped. His hands were limps in hers.
“No, Tim!” Brit shouted.
His head jerked up, eyes wide. “Don’t yell at me.”
“You need to stay awake.”
He frowned, gaze still centered on the floor. He looked up at her. “Can we watch some vids?”
Brit almost laughed. “Yes, we can watch some vids. You’ll stay awake?”
He yawned again. “I’ll try.”
She got him to move to the couch with her and they sat together as Brit switched through menus on the living room holo. Tim perked up when she found a documentary about dogs playing catch in zero-g.
“Em can do that!” he said. “He’s really good at it.”
“Tell me about Em,” Brit said.
“Not now, Mom. I want to watch the vid.”
“Fine.”
Brit leaned on an elbow so she could keep Tim in her peripheral vision, worried his head would start to nod again. He was rapt now, nodding with the images on the screen and laughing as different dogs flipped and kicked off from walls, using surprisingly deft motions to control their momentum. The documentary moved on to cover other animals and insects responses to micro-gravity.
“Do you see that bee, Mom?” Tim asked.
“I see it, sweetheart.”
When the door opened and Andy stood in the doorway, Brit couldn’t stop herself from smiling at him. Tim glanced from the screen to notice his father and then immediately looked back, caught up in the show.
“Tim!” Cara squealed. She slid next to her brother and caught him in a hug he immediately tried to struggle away from.
“I’m watching the show, Cara,” he complained.
“You’re awake.”
“Duh,” Tim said.
Andy got on both knees in front of Tim and stared at him, then reached out to tousle his hair. Tim moved his head to see around Andy.
“Dad, you’re in the way.”
“I’m glad you’re awake, buddy.”
“You should watch this show. We saw dogs in zero-g just like Em. Now they’re talking about fish in zero-g.”
“That’s not exactly anything new,” Cara chided.
“Shut up,” Tim said. “It’s neat. You might learn something, Cara.”
Brit met Andy’s gaze. His eyes were moist.
Brit frowned.
Andy nodded, and Brit could see worry battling with relief in his expression.
Brit hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Tim’s mention of the poem and how he had dreamed of being told about it. She was afraid he was still trapped in a sort of dream, that they weren’t free of whatever Heartbridge had done to him.
she said, then gave Andy a sharp look.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
STELLAR DATE: 10.01.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Heartbridge Corporate HQ, Raleigh
REGION: High Terra, Earth, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The window in the small conference room’s wall only had a view of an exterior wall.
Jirl sat in her plas chair wondering why anyone would go to the trouble of putting a window in a place that couldn’t actually view anything. The window allowed light into the room but also served as a reminder they were twenty stories ‘underground’, deep in the skin of the High Terra ring.
Arla sat at the end of the table, stirring a cup of coffee, while two lead scientists futzed with a control panel on the other side of the room.
As far as Jirl could tell, Arla’s mind was elsewhere. With the upcoming local test for Colonel Yarnes, they had been wrapping up loose ends in the office before they would board a ship for Venus that afternoon.
The scientist who was going to do most of the talking—a woman named Jennifer Woods—cleared her throat and squared her shoulders. She wore her hair away from her face in a pony tail that made her look girlish, thought she was probably nearly fifty.
A holodisplay built into the conference table activated, showing a potato-shaped asteroid large enough to make bits of infrastructure on its surface visible.
“We’ve been studying the data from the Clinic 46 attack,” Dr. Woods said. “It shows some remarkable things. Based on the report, there were only three Weapon Born seeds available on the station. At this time mark, you can see them here.” She pointed to a section of space above the asteroid and three green icons blinked alive.
“At the time of the breach on maintenance airlock thirty-one, here—” she pointed to a tiny location on the surface, “the three drones were parked near the command deck airlock. The data shows their AI recognizing the explosion at the airlock and sending response requests to the command deck. Just as those requests come in, the command data network is taken offline. Almost simultaneously, the remaining empty drones in the fleet hangar section attack the exterior doors and exit the station. Here you can see that.”
A swarm of red icons flowed from a point on the opposite end of the asteroid and spread out along its midsection, forming a ring around the axis.
“Defense systems inside the clinic come online to respond to the interior attack but at this point 46 had lost the majority of its local defense force to the mission on the Worry’s End. With the defense command system offline, only local systems respond. There is no coordinated counter attack. The breach team splits in two and one goes to the command section and kills most of the officers there, while the others go down to the research sections, taking limited fire along the way. That’s all fairly standard.”
Jirl watched Woods’ face as she spoke, wondering if the scientist had known anyone who’d died in the clinic attack. Her dispassionate explanation of the events was almost unnerving.
Arla sipped her coffee and nodded to indicate she was listening.
“The systems attack on the interior defenses wouldn’t stand out if the drones weren’t moving in concert. Everything here is coordinated, and what’s more, the attacker completely dominated the three Weapon Born AI.”
The second scientist, an anxious man with a pot belly, interjected, “It was Jickson’s AI. Dr. Woods keeps dancing around the truth, but this is something we can no longer deny. Jickson’s AI demonstrated administrative control over both the station’s systems and the other AIs. We’re also not including the data from Shuttle 26-11, a second-generation system that shouldn’t have been capable of undermining its programming.”
Woods gave her colleague an irritated look. “Dr. Tentri’s passion is commendable, but there is no conclusive proof that Jickson’s AI was present at Clinic 46. We’re still trying to track the entry points on the defense system attack.”
“Jickson’s AI has evolved,” Dr. Tentri said, spreading his hands toward Arla and Jirl, his tone high and pleading. “It is time we recognized how critical it is that we regain control of it.”
Arla laughed. “We can recognize any number of things as critical, Dr. Tentri. That doesn’t mean we’re going to have them handed to us. We can’t control what Jickson did. There are a few different options in play to try and recover the stolen property but at this point I’m not sure we can count on ever recovering that asset. You have Jickson’s research and you have the data from Clinic 46. Replicate what you can.”
“Replicate it?” Tentri said. “Jickson’s work constitutes a crime against humanity by Terran law.”
Arla set her cup down hard on the conference table. “That’s enough, Tentri.”
The scientist froze with his mouth half-open. None o
f them were used to anger from Arla. She never cracked.
“We are not here to talk about what can’t be done, or undone,” Arla said. “We’re here to review the facts and formulate a plan to move forward. You were given this data because we have need to demonstrate the latest system capabilities for the TSF in less than three days and what happened on Clinic 46 appears to constitute a major leap forward in our program. Don’t you think?
“What makes me just a little angry is that we don’t seem to be the one’s spearheading these advances in our own program. We can’t assume the TSF and even the Marsians won’t have the general surveillance data of the attack. There was a civilian freighter in the area that seems to have disappeared. It appears to me that we have a single AI that can control more than one hundred fifty drones, in addition to shutting down the defense systems of a relatively well-defended facility.”
Arla looked from Woods to Tentri. “Wouldn’t you say our systems are slightly ahead of the Marsians and TSF?”
Tentri didn’t realize she was being sarcastic. “Ten years at least,” he said.
Arla gave him a tight smile. She glanced at Jirl.
“I’m glad you’re good at your job, Dr. Tentri,” Arla said. “It provides me the opportunity to be good at mine.”
Tentri frowned slightly, obviously not following her line of reasoning. Jirl noted that Woods was leaning way from Tentri, as if she didn’t want to be associated with him.
“How close are you to replicating these results in your other subjects?” Arla asked.
“We’ve begun designing the experiments,” Woods said, “but it’s going to take time. Honestly, this looks like an aberration. We don’t know what Jickson did to her specifically.”
“Her?” Arla asked.
“The AI. He refers to her in his notes as female.”
“Interesting. Go ahead.”
Woods nodded to herself. “There are so many variables. We also can’t preclude the fact that this AI is implanted. That was a part of Jickson’s research that we just haven’t engaged with in a meaningful way. That’s what Dr. Tentri was referring to. It’s impossible to know what changes that has led to. The AI could be using the human pathways.” She shrugged. “I can’t even begin to explore the possibilities.”
“You think it’s pseudoscience,” Arla said.
“I don’t want to speculate,” Woods said more firmly.
“Well, I need you to speculate. I’m putting you in charge of the real-time demonstration. I want something close to what we saw at Clinic 46. I want to at least be able to say we’re laying the groundwork for this kind of capability.”
Woods nodded quickly. “We can create a use-case and a research roadmap. I can’t…I won’t include the hybrid models that Jickson did. Honestly, we’ve kept those notes in a completely separate database system so that the rest of our research isn’t tainted.”
Jirl wondered if using the neural frameworks of young test subjects made everything the fruit of a poisoned tree. She didn’t voice the concern. The two scientists seemed to have compartmentalized their ethics and drawn a line at the implantation of AI. She understood why that was an easy place to decide their morality began.
Arla spent the next few minutes tearing into the scientists about the rest of their projects being behind schedule. They were lucky she was focused on the demonstration. Once they were past this hurdle, she would be reviewing all work products and realigning responsibilities as necessary. She threatened a reduction in resources, including salary.
When the two researchers shuffled out of the room, Woods with her back stiff and Tentri hanging his head, Arla took another sip of her coffee.
They sat in silence for a minute as Arla seemed to be considering the meeting. Jirl knew this was time to let her boss think. It wouldn’t do Jirl any good to insert her thoughts into Arla’s process.
“What if we sanitized the data and showed Yarnes and Kade the replay from Clinic 46?” Arla asked.
Jirl turned her empty coffee cup on the table. “Is that setting us up for expectations we can’t deliver on?”
“Maybe. But it might do something else. It might demonstrate we have power they didn’t expect.”
“Is that something we want?”
“It’s come up among the board members,” Arla said. “There’s been discussion of a move toward OuterSol, away from Terra. It wouldn’t happen immediately, but with the fleet at Forty-Six now requiring a move, the overall situation requires re-thinking. Tentri does bring up a good point about the restrictive legal environment on Terra.”
“Mars won’t be much different,” Jirl said. “Or the JC.”
“We could establish our own nation within the JC,” Arla said. “Or perhaps out in the Scattered Disk.”
“Nations go to war.”
Arla laughed softly. “True. There’s no future in that. I think we have some outsized egos that think they can do things better. I’m not sure they’ve thought it through.”
Jirl chose her words carefully. “It seems that this project is getting bigger than it was originally conceived.”
“You aren’t going to start using the same hyperbole as the science quacks, are you? It’s a means to an end, Jirl. Can you imagine the lives that could be saved in conflict if we had the power to just shut down a hostile fortress? Think of all the splinter terrorist groups out there, the pirates, the cults, that could be controlled with this kind of power.”
Jirl smiled. “You’re accusing me of hyperbole?” She tapped the tabletop. “If we use the data from the clinic attack, I think one of two things might happen. Both Mars and Terra will want to know when they can get it, or they’ll start viewing us as a threat. Neither are good for the company.”
“So we sit on this?”
“We recover our property,” Jirl said. “Woods and Tentri are saying they need to study what’s happened and currently they can’t do that. Everything they might try without Jickson’s AI is just stumbling in the dark.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“Rodri sent the response to Cal Kraft. He’s going to get the Second Fleet ready to move. It’s going to take a bit of time to get even skeleton crews there to move the ships.”
“To Europa,” Arla said.
“Yes. We have a contingent at Europa already. The local government is friendly and it’s close enough to Forty-Six that they can be there in less than a week. We can staff crews off the Cho and Ganymede.”
“Does Kraft know where Jickson’s AI is moving next?”
“He hasn’t responded yet, but I suspect it’s the Cho. Their son is sick. Did you read that part of the report?”
Arla nodded, not saying anything about Kraft’s abuse of another civilian. No one had mentioned the operation on Petral Dulan, which had been outlined in a previous report.
“They’ll go to the Cho, and then they’ll try to find their way out even further, where all the other AI are going.”
To Alexander, Jirl thought, not sure what the thought meant exactly.
“There’s a lot of travel time between any of the Jovian moons and Saturn space. And a lot more out to Neptune,” Jirl said. “With the fast movers available at Europa, Kraft will catch them. The question we’ll need to answer is where he should take the AI.”
“We need to make a decision about our long-term home in OuterSol,” Arla said.
“Yes,” Jirl said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
STELLAR DATE: 10.01.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Shuttle 26-11, Callisto Orbital Habitat (Cho)
REGION: Callisto, Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
What was Xander?
On the shuttle ride back to Sunny Skies, as everyone else seemed amazed and grateful to have Tim back, Lyssa couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that they had escaped a very dangerous situation and no one else seemed to recognize how close they had come to disaster. Xander was an AI capable of things she hadn’t even conceived. How had he pulled Cara in
to his expanse?
She watched Cara, now sitting next to Tim with Brit on the other side, smiling as she demonstrated how to check her brother’s pulse. He continued to act disengaged but at least he was awake. Lyssa wasn’t sure how different the two brain states truly were.
Watching each person’s different status, she mulled over the fairly simple system Cara had used to translate Link transmissions to an audio signal, allowing Lyssa to talk to crew on Sunny Skies when she chose—or even people off the ship, Lyssa supposed, though she had never tried.
Xander must have had a way to map Cara’s neural activity and directly interface with her cortex. When asked about it, he had simply waved a hand.
Only Lyssa didn’t buy that. Had there actually been some interface for Cara that the others couldn’t see since they were immediately caught up in their Links? That seemed like the most likely explanation. It would be easy enough to drape some lattice over Cara, allowing a physical connection, much like the system Heartbridge used in their Weapon Born imaging process.
An alternative was that Cara had experienced the meeting as a holoprojection—though a large-scale holo in the room would have been detectable. It would also have been hard to maintain that close to the power generation systems.
If either option was the case, Lyssa decided, it meant Xander was a liar.
She also pored through databases concerning the history and deployment of multi-nodal AI—those which were on the order of Fred, AI of the Mars 1 Ring—and other massive systems controlling networks or physical places too complex for even groups of humans to maintain.
Multi-nodal AI had been developed by governments, mostly, due to the cost and resources involved, but also because other governments tended to view them as hostile technology. Very few powerful AI had been allowed to operate throughout history outside of very tight constraints. The idea of a separate, self-described multi-nodal AI coordinating events on Proteus seemed much more sinister than a collection of escapees.
Xander had implied that he was only a shard of the actual AI he referred to: Alexander. What would that be like, to have bits of her consciousness divided up and spread throughout Sol, representing her and reporting back?
